Such DFW. Very Orwell. So Doge. Wow.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/11/such-dfw-very-orwell-so-doge-wow/

by hackhackhack • 13 years ago

42 56 13 years ago

tl;dr An article espousing the merits of postmodernism and the obsolescence of so-called "Standard White English" (formal English), while also being written largely in SWE itself.

Apparently, the "masses" read Reddit. Writing in formal academic English is for privileged white people and should be phased in favor of broken, anarchic, meme-inspired vernaculars, except on Wikipedia.

How charming.

skylan_q• 13 years ago

DFW was mentioned and then I skipped the rest of the article to the comments. A commenter said "You had me at DFW". I felt the opposite.

Kluny• 13 years ago

I don't have downvote privileges. But I found this comment to be condescending without adding anything to the discussion but sarcasm.

na85• 13 years ago

How interesting. I do have downvote privileges and found your comment to add literally nothing at all to the conversation.

sp3326• 13 years ago

It's a piece in favor of writing however you want to because CSWE is hard to express yourself in. It's not really in favor of meme-inspired vernacular ("a horrific mess") but maybe it's still better than constraining ourselves to formal English.

I'm not sure I agree with the part about people being mistrusted just because they speak that way though.

aaronem13• 13 years ago

Would you make the same argument for programming languages? Should anyone feel free to code in whatever "vernacular" style he please, because living up to a defined standard makes it "hard to express [one]self"?

No doubt someone will attempt the argument that there is a qualitative difference between a language in which one speaks to a computer, and that in which one speaks to other people, but in this case I contend it's a distinction without a difference. The very reason why coding standards exist, after all, is because what we write in programming languages must be understandable to other people, no less than to the computer, and supine permissiveness as regards writing style impairs the legibility of one's code for the other people who must also read it.

Granted, it takes more effort to live up to the coding style required by whatever project one happens to be working on, just as it takes more effort to express a thought in Wallace's "SWE" than in whatever corrupt vernacular happens to be one's native pidgin. In exchange for this additional effort, one produces a result which is both more generally legible and more likely to be taken seriously. (On that latter point in particular -- would you have read this far if I were writing, not in that acrolect Wallace and his latter-day imitator so deride, but rather in my native Southern American English? Don't seem any too likely to me.)

anigbrowl5• 13 years ago

CSWE is hard to express yourself in

This claim baffles and infuriates me.

rezendi• 13 years ago

I note with great amusement your use of "tl;dr".

philosophus2• 13 years ago

It's also a little unfair to criticize standard English for being largely what is spoken by white people. English is the language of English people. They are white. I would assume that standard Swahili, for example, closely correlates to language as spoken by primarily black people.

fosap3• 13 years ago

"Doge" is even more childish and cancerous than ragecomics. In 2 years most of us will try to forget how popular it once was.

zaroth• 13 years ago

Still don't understand if it's supposed to be pronounced as dog, doggie, dougue. But perhaps that's the point? Either way I've had quite enough of it.

elag3• 13 years ago

First time I heard of it was in the context of dogecoin which I assumed was something inspired by the Venetian Republic.

aaronem13• 13 years ago

If it helps, the English IPA for "doge" would be /doʊʒ/; if you need a key, Wikipedia has a good one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English

anigbrowl5• 13 years ago

It's an awful lot easier to appreciate if you actually have a dog and have to spend a lot of time deciphering its communications.

russellsprouts• 13 years ago

This video[1], as far as I know, is where the word doge originated. Know Your Meme[2] agrees, for what it's worth.

1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLSgRzCAtXA

2: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge

wyager• 13 years ago

Apparently language standards are racist/classist/whatever against everyone except the people who made the standard.

Damn those British, oppressing me with spellings like "theatre" and "dialogue".

aaronem13• 13 years ago

Not quite; there seems an implicit claim that oppressiveness exists along a gradient which, I can hardly resist observing, correlates closely with the average skin tone of those who employ a given dialect. On one end of this gradient, Wallace's "Standard White English" oppresses basically everyone on the planet save its few most fluent speakers; on the other, I've never seen anyone even try to make a claim of oppressiveness on behalf of, for example, AAVE.

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

John Zerzan claims that all language is inherently oppressive.

Not that I agree, but there you are.

kabdib• 13 years ago

Uh, okay. SWE exists. It is cold, impersonal and so forth. What now, am I supposed to rebel? Burn a library? Ohmigod, I think that I'm The Man now. [commits suicide]

This is just a lot of jumping up and down informing us that there is gravity, that it exists and works, and that it is cold and impersonal. Somehow I feel I am not improved by the information.

You want to rail on language? Try reading an Army manual. Or just about any computer documentation (equal opportunity here, btw, but if you crave a villain: Oracle, and we've just gone Godwin...)

devindotcom• 13 years ago

I have my own long, long column I'm working on (for TechCrunch, no less) on this topic. Nice to see Jon chiming in, but I think he dismisses the usefulness of the type of essentially formal prose being replaced by more conversational stuff. If you ask me, it's important to consider the strengths of the old way as well as the new one, which is what I'm attempting to do (4000 words and counting...).

Also, I disagree with the idea that SWE, or however you like to define it, works as a "mask." I express myself best in that language, personally, and I suspect many others do too. Conventional, "prescriptivist" English is to me very powerful, because the words all have agreed-upon meanings and relationships -- when you break those down, you allow new modes of expression but you reduce cointelligibility.

elag3• 13 years ago

And we call that poetry.

baldurrdash• 13 years ago

Yep: http://www.waywordradio.org/mezangelle_1/.

philosophus2• 13 years ago

Agreed, if you are trying to understand the topic and not the author, then injecting non-standard usage and "personality" is simply a distraction. There is something narcissistic about believing your writing should reflect you, rather than your topic.

Dewie• 13 years ago

This article seems to be anti-establishment for the sake of being anti-establishment.

Intentionally "broken" English can be fun and cute and equally valid and expressive as standard English - if not for the adoption of it - but I don't see much that actually improves on more standard English, in a more-or-less objective way. An improvement might be to promote a gender-neutral pronoun ('they' for example) and disambiguating "you" when it is unclear if you are talking about singular you, personal you or 'general' you.

Or maybe this is totally unrelated to what the author is talking about.

aaronem13• 13 years ago

Say what else you like about Southern American English, but we solve the second-person plural problem quite handily with nominative and oblique y'all, and genitive y'all's.

angersock• 13 years ago

I'm willing to wager that future historians (combing, perhaps, through ancient metal disks found in strange sort of mausoleum in Utah) are going to be greatly annoyed at deciphering communications from current times.

One of the annoying side-effects of memes (doge, le, whatever the next thing from 4chan is) is that they put very heavy context into whatever uses them--they shade the meaning in a very particular way, and once you are lacking that context it becomes very hard to pull out meaningful information.

mcphilip• 13 years ago

In the spirit of the article:

TL;DR write all the words! much slang makes doge happy. disregard old farts' style. acquire upvotes, much happiness achieved!

----------------

I, for one, love good longform journalism (e.g longform.org) and appreciate the consistent usage of SWE. I'm not convinced the OP article's claim that SWE can make a commenter seem less trustworthy to other users on sites like reddit. The links to popular comments in r/bestof and r/DepthHub are almost always written in SWE.

swordswinger12• 13 years ago

I posit that the author of this article has only ever read that one George Orwell essay[1]. If he had read any others he would have probably known better than to connect an author renowned for his clean, precise, journalistic prose to an argument about how such prose is outmoded.

[1](http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/Politics_and_the_English_...)

asveikau2• 13 years ago

For a guy who is trying to celebrate and identify with (possibly attach himself to) "the masses" for their nonstandard grammar, this guy sure comes off as pretentious. I don't think this is really about those topics. The author would just like everyone to know how smart he is for considering it.

aaronem13• 13 years ago

While I don't love the author and carry no brief on his behalf, I would like to point out that "you're pretentious" and "you just want to look smart[er than everybody else]" are, in my experience, the two charges most commonly leveled against one who uses acrolect (the proper name for what Wallace calls "SWE"), by one who is incapable of doing the same.

asveikau2• 13 years ago

Perhaps some do have such a reaction. I don't think this is the case for me specifically. He genuinely comes off as pretentious to me, and as someone who is very deeply interested in language I find the content intellectually vacuous. He hasn't really said anything, just made a few references.

Such DFW. Very Orwell. So Doge. Wow.

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